On 2/28/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay(a)bigpond.com> wrote:
These facts are never going to go away, whether or not
Wikipedia includes
them. There are enough people who care about trivia (and whole books have
been written about the manner in which the songs of the Beatles were
composed) that they will feel that an article on Paul McCartney is
incomplete without their favorite fact being included. It may well be a
piece of pop philosophy upon which they have founded their life. All you
need is love, you know, and though you may not agree, just how much of a
zealot should one be in making a bonfire of these little factoids?
Your point is apt - whole books have been written on the subject, and
they probably weren't called "Paul McCartney". It's not about being a
zealot, it's just being tidy, and part of the whole process of
reorganising and categorising information that is, after all, what
Wikipedia is about.
It seems to me that many of the "Death to
Trivia" crusaders are perpetuating
a small deception here (one of which you yourself are not guilty), by
deliberately including boring and useless information under the category of
trivia, portraying ALL such information as similar. Of course we don't want
to include every known, sourced, indisputable but minor fact about a person
or subject in an article. But not every minor fact is uninteresting or
useless. We should see ourselves as plucking out the diamonds from the
I don't think anyone was suggesting that. But there are certainly
completely trivial facts that are uninteresting, and there are
interesting trivial facts that are simply irrelevant to the article at
hand
Not that I'm saying anything original there.
Steve